Author
Topic: Formatting of one article changes another one (Read 655 times)

I'm working on a four-page document. There is some weird dynamic happening between a text box on page 1 and a text box on page 2. When I "get text" from a .odt document for the article on page 2, the formatting (alignment and font size) of the article on page 2 changes, and vice versa. I can't seem to get them both to look the way I want them to at the same time. The .odt documents are completely different files, why are they somehow interacting with each other?Thanks for any help you can provide!

Without access to the original ODT documents - and knowing exactly how you're importing your text (which importer, settings, etc.) - it's difficult to know exactly what's going on but I would guess that the situation you're getting is a consequence of the import function sharing styles between the text frames.

Depending on how you import your text, Scribus could be adding styles to automatically format the first text frame from the imported text, and then modifying the styles when the text is imported into the second text frame. Every subsequent import would modify the existing styles and therefore change the document formatting.

For example, if you import the first document which has a style "Heading" formatted to Arial 22pt and then import another document which has a style "Heading" formatted to Times 24pt, Scribus may - depending on how you import - just re-use the existing "Heading" style and change the formatting accordingly. This would mean that existing text formatted with that style would also change.

I would usually recommend importing text as plain text and applying the formatting manually in Scribus as required. This gives you full control over how the text is formatted.

Text import is a powerful function but it takes time to get used to how it works. As utnik said above, you need to know what you're doing to use it properly and that, as with most non-trivial things, takes practice.

Personally I only ever import plain text but my situation allows for that, it's not the best solution for everyone.